An American writer between Paris and New York discovers different wines... on a shoestring. Stories, tastings, slices of life and glasses of wine.

Sunday, February 08, 2009

Flaw!

I think I'm usually pretty lucky. There are some things that haunt wine lovers. Corked wines. Premature oxidation of white Burgundies (and, some are now sinisterly saying, of Alsaces perhaps and next, who knows, Muscadet?). Brettanomyces. Other sundry flaws that leave you aghast and pouring out glass and bottle into the nearest drain. I don't usually run into those specters. My corked bottle rate is so low you'd think I had some kind of saran wrap secretly hidden in my fingers.*

But recently, alas, my luck was out. I had the most alarmingly, awfully flawed bottle of wine I have perhaps ever had the misfortune to taste.2003 Léon Barral Faugères Tradition. Now, I had the 2005 version of this usually lovely and straightforward wine a few weeks ago. It was, well, lovely and straightforward.

Flash forward to its 2003 incarnation. Uh, oops! Who poured nail polish remover into my Faugères? The nose was acetone and ungainly. It could only be less marked on the palate, I reasoned in my benightedness. Slurp. Ugh, no! It was in fact worse. Along with the nail polish remover taste was a dirty, rotten uncleanness in the background, hovering and killing all fruit and pleasure.

For once, for me, one sip was enough.

*For, as old wino's tales tell us, dipping saran wrap into a glass of corked wine whisks away the corkiness (along with some fruit and other flavor components, but you can't have everything).

I think it’s the Society of Wine Educators that includes identifying different sorts of wine flaws as part of their courses? The collection of seven wines from Jean Bourdy that we tasted in a late-night Jurafest could have served as the final exam. In several cases there were so many competing flaws overlapping each other that it became difficult to single them out. I suppose you could call that complexity....

Hmm. Not sure I'd be able to identify so many competing flaws, Peter. Sometime I guess ignorance really is bliss!

I tend to have streaks of bad wines. Either I get none at all for a long time, or I might get 3 or 4 in the same month. I don't mind if I have other wines at hand, but if a flawed wine means I have to open something I was planning to save just so I can eat my dinner, I can get very annoyed indeed!